Core Memory

• The Child Prodigy Teaching Other People How To Learn

  Andrew Hsu has been something of a legend for most of his life.In 2007, The Seattle Times published a story documenting Hsu’s graduation from the University of Washington. He was only 16 and had just picked up three degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry.But stories of Hsu’s academic feats had already been circulating for years. He’d won science contests, written an award-winning autobiography and started a foundation to help children in need as an adolescent. Hsu’s family hails from Taiwan, and the young man often found himself being interviewed on TV and touring the country to tell his story.After graduating from college, Hsu pursued a PhD at Stanford before dropping out and using some Thiel Fellowship money to start an ed-tech company called Airy Labs.That company struggled, but Hsu’s latest venture – Speak – has been booming. It’s an AI-powered language tutor that enjoyed immense success first in South Korea and then beyond. It’s been valued at more than $1 billion after a $78 million funding round closed near the end of last year.In this episode, Hsu graciously tolerates my child prodigy questions and then gets into how he hit on AI and language before it was cool and how people can learn better. This episode was made possible by E1 Ventures, backers of bold people and bold ideas. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

  --------  

  1:17:52

  --------

  1:17:52
• Fixing American Science Funding

  This week on the Core Memory podcast – we fix American science and advance civilization.We were joined by Anastasia Gamick and Adam Marbleston from Convergent Research. They’ve spent the last few years pioneering a new model of science funding centered on FROs or Focused Research Organizations. And FROs take a little bit of explaining.Convergent Research has backing from Eric Schmidt, James Fickel (a fantastic patron of science) and others and tries to fund small groups of people chasing very big ideas. In essence, Convergent wants to support things that help open up new fields of science and technology, and it funds folks whose ideas might be too expensive for a university lab and/or not obviously commercial enough for typical venture capital. Gamick and Marblestone argue that the FRO model fills a crucial gap in US science funding.Convergent tends to put $30 million to $50 million into what look like quasi-start-ups and gives them five to six years to build their thing. To date, it has backed around a dozen efforts with a pretty heavy emphasis on the bio-tech and neuroscience fields.Recently, Convergent also put out the Gap Map, which is a well-researched exploration of all the things that it thinks the world still needs to develop. Go ahead. Poke around.In this episode, we break down FROs, science funding, the US vs. China, brains and much more.Our show is made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

  --------  

  1:22:43

  --------

  1:22:43
• The New Era of Consumer DNA Tests

  This week’s guest is Kian Sadeghi, the founder and CEO of Nucleus. Sadeghi has everything you want in a controversialish bio-tech CEO. He’s a college dropout, a Thiel Fellow and a “wild child,” as one Nucleus investor told me. He’s also trying to uplevel the consumer DNA testing game by poring over entire human genomes with every test instead of just looking at snippets of DNA as companies like 23andMe and Ancestry have done for many years.Nucleus charges about $500 for its mainstream health test aimed at adults. It promises to give you insights about a wide variety of health conditions, including your likely disposition toward things like mental health issues, cancers and rare genetic diseases. You can use the information to inform your lifestyle choices and to compare your DNA traits with those of your potential baby making partner to see if you’re a good baby making fit. (You can go here to see how Sadeghi uses this information on dates.)The company also has a new, far more expensive service ($5,000) aimed at parents going through the IVF process to help them select embryos with certain traits. This type of service is quickly becoming all the rage, as we noted in our recent video on Orchid, which you should absolutely watch because it’s awesome. (Orchid contends that it does a much deeper dive on the embryo DNA than does Nucleus. I gave Sadeghi a chance to respond to some of this in the podcast.)Sadeghi has been controversialish because he’s made big claims about Nucleus’s ability to discern things like someone’s IQ from DNA and because he’s been an aggressive marketer in a bio-tech field that tends more toward conservatism - lest one become the next jailed blood testing start-up CEO. He’s also been way more outspoken about the rather obvious direction we’re heading toward where people will be picking the desired traits of their future kids and where sex may well just become a purely recreational event as society moves toward IVF and artificial wombs for the majority of its new human production.What’s clear enough is that the first wave of consumer genetic testing companies arrived many years ago when DNA tests were rarer and more expensive, and we’re now seeing them be usurped by a new crop of services that really take advantage of the massive decreases in sequencing costs. In short, we can test more of your DNA more cheaply than ever before, and we have much better data and software to analyze the DNA now.Sadeghi and I get into all of this on the podcast.The show was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1, or at least that’s what I tell my kids.Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

  --------  

  1:24:50

  --------

  1:24:50
• An AI Engineer Is Here, and It Might Redesign the Physical World

  The news here is that Paul Eremenko has a new start-up called P-1 AI.Eremenko is billing P-1 as one of the first stabs at building an AI engineer. The company’s “Archie” AI can help with day-to-day engineering tasks today, and, if all goes according to plan, will be designing buildings, planes and rockets in the future. We, of course, getting into what Archie can do today and what it might do in the years to come in the pod. Spoiler alert: Eremenko thinks we get MUCH better spaceships. Most of our time, though, was spent discussing Eremenko’s rather incredible life and career.Born in Ukraine, Eremenko came to the US at 11 and went on to get aeronautics degrees from MIT and Caltech and then – just to show off - a law degree from Georgetown. He’s worked at DARPA and Google and as CTO of both Airbus and United Technologies. He also tried to turn hydrogen into a mainstream fuel source for commercial planes at Universal Hydrogen, although that venture did not pan out.And so, we got into Eremenko’s life, aerospace and where AI is possibly taking us a species.Eremenko’s dog Li made a special guest appearance and picked me as his favorite podcast host by the end of the show.As ever, we thank the wonderful people at E1 Ventures for their support with the podcastEnjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

  --------  

  1:18:18

  --------

  1:18:18
• The Future of Money

  More than a decade ago, someone I respect told me to go meet these young, Irish brothers - Patrick and John Collison. The brothers had started a small company called Stripe, and my friend assured me they were primed to accomplish big things. The Collisons were working on payments, and I had no interest in payments, so my attention waned a bit as they described how Stripe functioned and what it would one day do. What was very clear, though, was that the brothers were bright - as in exceptionally bright - and focused and determined. I interview start-up founders for a living, and there’s been a handful of times where I knew for certain that the people in front of me would succeed at whatever they chose to do. This was one of those times. This is a long way of saying that I have the utmost respect for the Collisons and try to take particular note when they and/or Stripe make big bets. They tend to have a pretty accurate window into the future. Last year, Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge was a two-year-old start-up that had started out doing some NFT nonsense and then pivoted almost right away into stablecoins. Going off the premise that the Collisons must have spent $1 billion on a very, very, very young company for a reason, we asked Bridge CEO Zach Abrams to come on the podcast to explain what Bridge does, what the hell stablecoins are and where the future of money is heading. Abrams, thankfully, did not disappoint. The short of it is that Bridge has made it much easier for companies and governments to move money internationally. SpaceX, for example, relies on Bridge to collect and process payments for its Starlink internet service in far off lands. The same goes for people sending and receiving remittances, which happens to be a massive part of our global economy. We discuss all this in the show and then get weird. Abrams talks about AIs using credit cards to accomplish tasks out in the world and a future where an AI might end up as the wealthiest being on the planet and what that could mean for us humans and the economy. This podcast was made possible with support from the fine people at E1 Ventures. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

  --------  

  1:31:01

  --------

  1:31:01

More Business podcasts

Trending Business podcasts

About Core Memory